Category — Sidenote

The mosquitoes in southern Italy can be bad. So bad, they drove the Greeks from Paestum when they wiped the city out with malaria.

We experienced these bad boys in a major way. With around 20 bites a piece, we headed to the pharmacy to try to find some spray.

It was pretty early in the trip, and I was still trying to get my vocab bearings. I walked up to the clerk and declared, “qualcosa per mosco,” pantomiming something flying through the air and stinging me. I knew that I knew the word for “mosquito,” somewhere in the back of my brain. Mosco seemed to fit.

“Afterbite?” came the question from the clerk. Sure, it wasn’t really a surprise that she figured out I couldn’t speak much Italian.

It wasn’t until after we’d walked out of the store that I realized my mistake. While “mosca” is “fly,” “zanzara” is “mosquito.” “Mosco” either meant nothing at all, or it meant mosque. I wasn’t sure. I could see a picture of a fly in the children’s vocabulary book I’d studied months earlier, but I couldn’t remember seeing a picture of a mosque.